We all called the barrow’s occupant “the Conqueror” now.
Dr. Cahill smiled. “What are your plans for next season?”
Everyone laughed, but I didn’t think he was joking. Once a man like Dr. Cahill creates a map of the world in his mind, the next, the only, thing for him to do is recreate the world in the map’s image. The people of the steppe travel thousands of miles across the seemingly unlandmarked plains, they have done so for countless generations, but they have never even invented a word for “map.” The first time I ever saw one was in the orphanage school far to the south, where I learned a hundred words for things I had never known, and was commanded to forget the names of everything I did.
While Dr. Cahill ordered the past for his students beneath the springtime stars, the diggers told their own stories over on the other side of the camp. The lore they traded was all modern, and mostly to do with the money they were earning and how it would be spent once they were home, but one night, standing in the dark outside of camp, I heard a slow, measured voice explaining the doom that would fall on any man who touched, by accident or design, a bone from under the barrow. “Even the dust,” said the senior driver. “Even the dust.” And after a silence they all began to pray.
“They are wiser than your learned men.”
I jumped. It was Kehboryavin. I had not heard his footsteps under the hush of the wind. The Alyakshin had remained camped a half-mile or so away from the dig.
“Were you at the barrow?” I demanded, shrill with shock.
His face was all gray angles under the quarter moon. He looked at me, then away to the camp, where the two fires burned orange, like beacons, or eyes.
“You always share the westerners’ fire, never your own people’s. Why is that?”
“The drivers aren’t my people. Anyway, they wouldn’t want me to.”
“I did not mean those piyevya.” The word meant, literally translated, “weak without walls.” “I meant my grandmother’s fire. She has been watching for you.”
I was silent a moment. “You aren’t my people, either.”
“And they are?” He gestured towards the other fire, where Dr. Cahill’s glasses caught the light, circles of fire in his sunburned Englishman’s face.
“—‘the gold and amber fields of the west’ could be a reference to the ancient Celtic trade—”
Kehboryavin listened to words he could not understand, or to my silence. Then he said, “Pelyoshin was never Alyakshin’s enemy,” and walked away.
I don’t know what moved me to spit at his back, “Pelyoshin is dead!”
But he didn’t respond.
I had said it in English.
In only two more days, the sod and dirt was cleared from the T-shaped barrow. Leroy Paltz, the photographer, and I worked late into the day, even after the rest had cleaned off their shovels and headed for their tents to rest for the evening’s celebration. The sun was a searing orange flame on the horizon when Leroy exposed his last plate. I held the camera’s black shroud against the wind, while my eyes took their own picture of the barrow’s central dome. It was huge and dark, its rough granite stained by centuries under the earth. It seemed to lean away from the bitter wind, yearning for the golden fire of the west. Covered with sod it had been merely a hump in the plains. Marked with string and cluttered with students, shovels and sieves, it had been—what?—an artifact. Helpless, quiescent. Dead.
Now, though. Now.
The wind blew more fiercely in the wake of the sun. I swayed and Leroy said my name. He was finished, already packing up his things. “Are you all right?”
“Tired.”
“It’s the wind,” he said knowledgeably. “It’ll dry you right out. A cup of tea and a glass of beer, in that order. Can you take the tripod?”
It wasn’t easy, turning my back on that resentful heap of stone. But it was good to head into camp with the prospect of a sponge bath, clean clothes, and something to drink before me. Leroy was right, the wind could take it right out of you.
I had hardly drawn my ration of bathwater from the drum, however, when Dr. Cahill came to find me.
“There you are,” he said. He was impatient; some snag had interrupted him savoring the approaching triumph. “If you wouldn’t mind, the drivers seem to want a word.”
I was surprised. I had assumed any problem would be the Alyakshin.
The drivers stood in a group on the scholar’s side of the line of lorries. Their leader, a man with a broad, dark, furrowed face that always reminded me of a tilled field, barely acknowledged me with a glance. He kept his eyes on Dr. Cahill as he spoke.
“He says they will not dig any more.”
“Tell him there isn’t any more digging to do. For heaven’s sake, they know very well we’ve uncovered the stone structure! How can they see what we’ve accomplished and still complain about doing farmers’ work?”
Dr. Learner and the others had approached by this time, one or two carrying lanterns against the gathering night, so the two groups confronted each other across the trampled grass, with me between. Some instinct made me glance up and away, and I saw not far off three horsemen silhouetted against the last of the light.
Dr. Learner said to me, “Tell them the work they’ll be doing from now on is the most important part of the whole job.”
“Tell them,” Dr. Cahill interrupted testily, “I’d do all the rest myself if only I could. Tell them they’re bloody lucky to have any part in this enterprise at all.”
He was missing the point completely, but it wasn’t my place to say so. I told the drivers what the two doctors had said. The drivers’ elder went into some detail about the threatened doom of any who touched the Conqueror or her minions’ bones.
When I’d finished, Dr. Learner said eagerly, “Ask them how they know about the Conqueror.”
Dr. Cahill said coldly, “I know bloody well how they know about the Conqueror, and so do you.”
He was staring at me, and the blood began to burn under my skin as Dr. Learner and then all the students understood and stared as well, or, embarrassed, looked away.
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Cahill,” I said. My voice was low enough, but I couldn’t keep it from trembling. “But I didn’t tell them anything about her.”
Leroy Paltz stepped forward from the group. “It isn’t as if the men couldn’t talk to the Alyakshin if they wanted to, Tom.”
“It’s quite a different dialect,” Dr. Learner said. “Still, it wouldn’t take much more than a word or two, their own imaginations would do the rest.”
“It isn’t as if this kind of thing hasn’t happened before,” Leroy added. “Think of Egypt in ‘Fourteen.”
Dr. Cahill glanced past me at the drivers. “Well, it hardly matters how they got onto it. The point is to get them off. Tell them—”
I told them. I told them repeatedly and at length, but Dr. Cahill might as well have been talking to the grass, or the wind. Eventually he threw up his arms and pretended to laugh. “Superstitious savages! You can give them lorries instead of horses, but you can’t bloody civilize them. All right! Come on you lot, if we’re going to be shifting stones tomorrow, we’ll need a hell of a good dinner tonight. Who’s for beer and jerky stew?”
Dr. Learner and the rest trailed after him, quietly, heads down. They knew as well as I that, for all his laughter, he was furious. Yet, at the same time, I knew that he had said nothing less than the truth. If he could have done it all himself, he would have.
The oldest driver knew it too. He said, “What kind of a man is that? He’d rather fuck a pile of bones than a live woman?” He looked me over and spat, just to one side of my feet.
A javelin’s point slid out of the darkness to tap his jacket over his heart. “Go back to your sty, city pig,” Kehboryavin said. “Speak to a woman of the tribes in such a manner again and I’ll see you roasting over a dung fire on a spit.”
Dr. Learner was right. Different dialect or no, he got his meaning across. The drivers
shuffled off with only an evil look or two, leaving me alone with the tribesman. The light from the two camps only seemed to cast the space between in deeper darkness. I was not unaware of the irony.
I said in English, “The noble savage rescues the beleaguered maiden.” It was a scene caption from a moving picture I’d seen just before we sailed.
Kehboryavin said, “Grandmother sent me to ask you to eat at her fire tonight. She’ll be in a bad temper if we are late, but I did not wish to interrupt. Perhaps it will sweeten her mood if I can tell her there is a problem with the digging.”
“Tell her what you like,” I said, and started for my tent.
“You aren’t still hoping you belong with them, are you? But then, it seems living between walls makes all the rest of them fools, I don’t know why you should be any different.”
I stopped. “May I ask you something, young chief? If you are such a bitter enemy of the westerners and those who take up their ways, why do you oppose waking the Conqueror?”
His laugh was indeed bitter, but his answer surprised me. “Why do you think I do oppose it? It is my grandmother who is so afraid of change. For myself, I say some change might not be so terrible a thing, if it should blow these men and their cities and diseases and laws from the grass.” He laughed again. “But you know as well as I do, the Conqueror is only bones, and a woman’s bones at that.”
Because the ocean of grass really does swell and move with the tide of wind, the ground level of the barrows was nearly three feet below that of the present. Alyak territory isn’t quite far enough north to mean permafrost, but the yellow loess clay stays cold and saturated late into the spring. Good for the grass, but a bad sign for the archeologists. However, as drainage ditches were painfully dug and the base of the long barrows was revealed, hope among the expedition members grew. They had rallied behind Dr. Cahill after the drivers announced their strike, and although their cheerfulness had been somewhat forced to begin with, it took on strength as the intact masonry was gradually revealed.
Dr. Cahill apologized to me: an exercise in good manners, since he no longer required my services as an interpreter. Unlike his colleague, Dr. Learner was actually quite pleased by the turn of events. Now that I was freed from having to relay instructions to native diggers, I was available to act as guide among the Alyakshin, and Dr. Learner could at one stroke advance his own work and avoid the back-breaking labor of the rest. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t rather have joined in with pick and shovel, but the scholars had been uncomfortable with me since the confrontation with the drivers. I decided ruthlessly that if I was going to be unhappy wherever I was, I might as well choose the work that left me free from aching muscles and blistered hands.
That was what I thought before we actually approached the Alyakshin camp. Any suffering of mine wasn’t because the ostracism was worse. In fact, the Alyak manners were exquisite, by my grandmother’s reckoning.
And there lay the source of my misery. Not the polite welcomes, but the memory of my aunt snapping my ear when I was rude. Not the buttered tea, but the memory of sipping from my mother’s cup, nestled in her lap, listening to her sing. Not the elders’ stories, but the stories of my own tribe, so like and so very different, with every name echoing the names of my family. Dead family, dead stories, dead tribe. Dr. Learner asked me about the differences. I pretended not to remember, and then lay awake half the night listening to the wind, afraid it was not pretense but truth. Yet why should I be afraid, when I had done nothing since I was a child but try to forget everything I had ever been? To forget was to attain all the goals that had waited for me at the end of the long road to the west.
My mistake was that I had turned my face back towards the east.
The long barrows were sound, but the leaning dome was in danger of collapse. Dr. Cahill had a nightly argument with himself about whether he had been right to strip the sod and earth from the structure. Every night he absolved himself, but he worried endlessly at his structural diagrams, his dusty hair standing in spikes and his glasses flickering in the lantern light. “It’s all guesswork, that’s the trouble!” he said once in the middle of dinner. “How is it propped up inside? What’s the condition of the foundation? The whole thing is more than twelve degrees off true.”
“It’s a sophisticated structure,” said one of the students who’d been with him at other digs. “Surprisingly sophisticated, considering they were a people who never invented the wheel. It’s a true dome.”
“Eskimos build domes—igloos—and they never came up with the wheel either. It’s not sophistication, it’s an imitation of nature,” someone else said.
“Perhaps that’s all wheels are.” I spoke to the tin plate on my lap, not intending to be heard, but a silence fell.
“The wheel is one of the fundamental machines of civilization,” another student said.
I looked around at sunburned faces hidden and revealed by the wind-tossed fire. “A fallen tree rolling down a hill. A water-rounded boulder tumbling in a stream. Eskimos live surrounded by ocean and ice. The people here—” I gestured at the night. “What would suggest a wheel to you here? Even if you came up with the idea, what would you make one with? Grass? Wind? The ancient Britons who built Stonehenge moved all those stones by sledge and raft, and they must have been surrounded by rolling trees and tumbled boulders. In fact, wasn’t it the Romans who introduced the wheel to Britain? Along with plumbing and heating and bricks and—”
Leroy Paltz laughed, and the tension broke.
“In any event,” Dr. Cahill said. “There’s no sense in speculating about cultural sophistication at this point. The barrows and dome are an impressive show of engineering—though perhaps not quite on the level of Stonehenge—” more laughter “—but it’s what’s inside that will tell us the most. And to find that out, we have to get in without bringing the top of the dome down on our heads. Now, this is the best plan I can come up with—and if doesn’t work, on my own head be it.”
The students got up from their camp stools and gathered at his shoulders to peer at his sketch. Around their own fire, the drivers were praying. The Alyakshin camp was nothing but a point of light in a sea of black.
I didn’t sleep that night.
The wind boomed and sighed and muttered around my tent. Sometimes I thought I caught a new note, an eager whining voice wrung from the rough corners of stone. That wind had traveled over a thousand thousand miles of grass, I thought. Surely it would recognize something that did not belong.
They used boards taken from the truck beds to prop the leaning side of the dome. The many cracks between stones seemed much blacker than they had, and there was some worry that the wind, or simply the process of drying, had done structural damage. But the foundation was exposed and drainage ditches dug, and still there was no sign of movement. Finally, everyone climbed out of the ditch and watched while Dr. Cahill walked the base of the dome, from the point where it met the long barrow on the east around to the west.
It was at the end of the day. The sun was a blaze of light that seemed to burn through my eyes into my brain. Green-gold grass washed towards it in waves, hiding the slow rise and fall of the steppe that was itself, grain of dust by grain of dust, moving ahead of the wind. The scholars, mud-caked and leaning with exhaustion, were gathered by the north arc of the dome, keeping out of Dr. Cahill’s light. The drivers were there, too, a clump of dark, suspicious men farther to the north. And out in the grass, a line of horsemen.
Dr. Cahill spoke. “It looks good.”
A sigh of released tension passed over the archeologists, and for a moment they seemed to sway like the grass.
“So.” Dr. Learner walked to the ditch, an iron wedge in one hand, a sledgehammer in the other.
Dr. Cahill squinted at him through his dusty glasses, then looked at the watch from his pocket, as if he were blind to the sun. “We’ve only got an hour or so of light left. It would make a lot more sense to wait for—”
He was drowned
by a chorus of groans. Dr. Learner laughed. “Come on, Tom, you know as well as I do, you’re not waiting for anything.”
“I only said it would make more sense.” Dr. Cahill grinned and reached for the hammer.
He meant to pry out only one block of stone in the course above the foundation, close to where the dome met the long barrow, in the assumption that the barrow wall would act as a prop for the weakened dome. He chose a big block, twenty-eight inches square by the tape, big enough to allow him to crawl through the space it left behind. It was hard work, forcing the wedge into a gap and then heaving with the iron pry bar, over and over, but no one offered to help. It was a kind of honor they did him. He grunted, his whole weight on the pry bar, his boots scrabbling for traction in the slick yellow mud of the trench bottom. One of the drivers lit a cigarette. The scent streamed by on the wind. Shadows grew long, and longer still.
When the stone block fell, the wind leapt into the square black hole with a sound like tearing, or fire.
“My God, Jack! Did you hear that?” Dr. Cahill turned his face to look at his colleague, but the setting sun forced his eyes closed even behind his dirt-streaked lenses. He turned back to the tomb. “It was sealed. It was bloody sealed!” He stuck his head in the gap.
“Tom!” Dr. Learner, no doubt like the rest of us, thought he was about to enter blind.
Dr. Cahill looked up from the trench and snapped his fingers at me. “You. Run to the camp and get a lantern. Quickly!”
I ran, anger and excitement and a strange kind of grief at war within my breast. I snatched a lantern from the door of Dr. Cahill’s tent and a box of matches from the table inside, then ran back. I lit the lantern with shaking hands and without waiting to be told slithered into the muddy ditch.
Dr. Cahill held out an imperative hand.
I clutched the lantern tight and, ignoring his unspoken command, bent against the stone to reach the light into the ancient darkness.
If the Conqueror truly slept within, I would be the one to wake her.
PEN & INK
In the Palace of Repose Page 10
